Most businesses are kinda like leaky buckets.
And most business owners spend their time running to the sink, just for a glass of water to try and keep that leaky bucket full.
Yet the bucket is leaking faster than their ability to keep filling it at the top.
Most often, the solution is to spend some time plugging the hole in the bottom of the bucket.
But when you’re plugging up holes in the bucket, you’re not filling it with water (ie: money)
The thing is, working on systems within your business takes time.
That’s time you’re not spending on chasing leads, or closing sales.
So it’s easy to keep putting off those big, high-level projects in preference to keeping the front end moving.
I get that sometimes, there seems to be little room from a cash-flow perspective for you to take time out of the endless client chase.
But if you don’t, you’ll be stuck in the endless client chase forever...
Constantly running from the tap to your leaky bucket, desperately trying to keep a bit of water in there.
It usually takes a mindset switch to re-set your priorities.
Because time spent on systems that allow your business to grow and thrive is NOT time wasted. Although it can seem like that when you’re only focusing on 2 metres ahead.
The way I see it -
In the startup phase (1-2 years), 80% of your time should be spent on sales and marketing, and 20% should be on strategy and systems.
But as you start to grow, that percentage needs to reverse.
Because once your marketing is properly dialled-in with your audience, campaigns take less time to get up and running.
So your focus needs to shift to: Where are the opportunities to grow my business?
What’s the next system, the next hire, the next initiative that I can leverage to get to the next level?
As the business owner, you’re basically an asset manager.
Kind of like a financial manager, whose job it is to get you the most amount of growth with the finances you’re investing.
The assets we’re managing as business owners are: our time, our money, our staff’s time, and our business’ money.
The better you can manage those resources, the more you can leverage your growth.
If you think it’s your job in business to do the work, you’re still carrying an employee mindset.
You’re not an employee, you’re an asset manager.
This shift in thinking has personally helped me be able to distance myself emotionally from the business. Not in terms of caring about my business and its results - my passion is still centered firmly there.
But in terms of thinking I need to be in the business all the time, taking care of little things my staff can actually do, all that day-to-day stuff we wrap ourselves up in… it’s just not our job to be stuck in that kind of detail.
Your business doesn’t need endless glasses of water.
It needs you to fix the damn hole.